Intent to Kill

by James Grippando

  Technically speaking, Doug Wells wasn’t supposed to die.

  The garrote was one of the Checker’s specialties. He couldn’t say that he’d learned much from the Spaniards, but this favorite method of execution under the Francisco Franco regime was a gem. The Checker had used it many times, with proven results. The beauty of the garrote was that it didn’t have to be fatal. You could take a man to the brink of death, release the tension, and revive him. They always spilled their guts when they regained consciousness.

  If they regained consciousness.

  Yes, the Checker had pushed Doug Wells further than the boss’s orders. Clients, however, didn’t always know best. The Checker knew how to deal with nosy journalists. Threats never worked. You had to eliminate them. He could have cited any number of homegrown Russian examples: the Murmansk television reporter who had been critical of local politicians; two journalists from Togliatti who got too close to the local mafia; Paul Klebnikov, the American editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian edition who knew too much about Russia’s oligarchs. Even head-in-the-sand Americans had heard about Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s best-known journalist. Threats and an attempted poisoning hadn’t stopped her from criticizing the Chechen War. She was finally shot in broad daylight, her body found in the elevator of her apartment building alongside the gun that was used to kill her—standard practice for Moscow’s arrogant hit men.

  Arrogance, however, wasn’t behind this execution. Doug Wells needed to go. Period. Still, the client was boss, and the boss wasn’t happy, as he made clear over the pirated iPhone that the Checker had provided him with.

  “You went too far,” his recent text message read.

  The Checker didn’t even try to justify his decision to eliminate Wells. Someday the boss would thank the Checker for overriding the order and doing what had needed to be done. For now, at least, no one would ever find the body—he was professional enough to have made sure of that.

  “Shit happens,” he replied.

  “I don’t pay big dollars for shit results.”

  “Job one went fine.” The elimination of the blackmailer.

  “I could have done that myself,” was the reply. “His balls were obviously bigger than his brain.”

  Typical. After the work was done, clients always thought they could have done it better themselves. The Checker didn’t go there.

  “Job two—so far, so good,” he text-messaged.

  Job two was implicating Babes for the murder of the blackmailer. Getting his (gloved) hands on Babes’s baseball bat had been beyond easy, and then it was simply a matter of leaving it at the crime scene after a home-run swing on a human head.

  The reply came quickly: “Job three—more bumbling.”

  The Checker took that one personally.

  Job three was to kill Babes in a way that looked like suicide—a troubled young man with some kind of disorder, overcome by the reality of his horrible acts. Everything had been falling right into place. The Checker was sure that he’d beaten the truth out of the blackmailer before delivering the death blow. Without question, he’d found the right family crypt, and Babes had definitely been hiding there. But the bundle of loose bindings in the corner told the rest of the story: Babes had freed himself and made a run for it. He was out on the streets somewhere, brave enough to have phoned in to his brother-in-law’s radio show that morning, quite possibly on the verge of naming names on the next live broadcast.

  Skunked by a fucking retard.

  “It will get done,” he messaged back.

  “Be sure it does,” was the final reply, and the exchange was over.

  The Checker switched on the lamp, then lay back on his bed, thinking and staring at his reflection in the big mirror on the ceiling. It was that kind of hotel. He was wearing chinos but no shoes, and he liked the way his sleeveless undershirt showed off his considerable muscles, even if he was alone.

  Two hundred push-ups, five hundred sit-ups—every morning. It had nothing to do with fitness. Over the years, plenty of whores had run from his bed with a busted lip or a black eye for not making enough of a fuss over his body. One way or another, the Checker always got what he paid for.

  So did his clients.

  His real name was Vladimir Beria. He was Georgian—not from the American South, but the former Soviet state. It wasn’t true, but Vladimir liked to tell people that he was a descendant of Lavrenti Beria, the notorious head of the KGB under much of Stalin’s rule. Lavrenti eventually went the way of many early members of the Soviet politburo: tried for conspiracy and executed by firing squad on the same day. But it was the beginning of Lavrenti’s career, not the abrupt end, that intrigued Vladimir. Lavrenti got his start in the Georgian secret police, the Cheka.

  Vladimir fancied himself a student of Georgian history, and being in need of a nickname in his chosen life of organized crime, he called himself the Cheka. As fate would have it, Vladimir was in Rhode Island when he coined his name, so even though everyone was on board with the pronunciation—the Cheka—what they thought he was really trying to say was the Checker.

  A rose is a roser. Or something like that.

  Vladimir walked to the bathroom, splashed hot water on his broad face, and lathered up his whiskers. He never used creams or gels. Soap and a straight razor, nothing more, and he shaved while listening to his favorite muziek. Vladimir’s taste in music was unusual, even when measured against the standards of a hotbed of counterculture like Providence. He was into traditional Georgian polyphonic songs, especially those of Svaneti. His very favorites were those sung in their original forms, which employ intervals and chords that simply do not occur in the diatonic scales of familiar Western music, such as the “neutral” third, which falls roughly between a minor and a major third. The technicalities of it were unimportant to Vladimir. His business was all about the effect—and there was nothing like an old Georgian work song and a straight razor to get the desired effect. Vladimir would insert his earbuds, get caught up in the music, and then perform his magic with the razor—or the garrote—while singing along at the top of his lungs, an a cappella nightmare to his contract hits.

  Doug Wells had certainly looked blown away.

  The straight razor would be the implement of choice on Babes—just as soon as Vladimir got his hands on the little twerp. But he would have to resist the urge to overdo the slashing. The hit, after all, was supposed to pass for suicide—self-inflicted wounds.

  His BlackBerry chimed, signaling another text message. Vladimir wiped the soap from his face and went to the nightstand to fetch it. The message was just a phone number, different from the number used to send the text messages. Whenever possible, people took a few extra steps when communicating with the Checker, just in case anyone ever tried to follow the trail.

  Vladimir dialed the number.

  Syndicated crime in Russia was not a model of organization, but the Checker was so effective that even the Mafia had entrusted him with high-level hits. The contract on Babes was the first and only job that the Checker had ever botched. He already knew his client was unhappy.

  What now?

  The man who answered the call spoke in broken English. An intermediary—another layer of protection between the Checker and his real client.

  “New plan,” the man said.

  Vladimir sat on the edge of the bed. “Talk to me.”

  “Forget it should look like suicide. Just take Babes out.”

  The reason for the intermediary was now clear: a direct order for a hit that used the target’s name. No way to couch it in the rubric of “job one” or “job two.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “And the big mouth, Ryan James. Enough talk on the radio. Boss man’s afraid somebody gonna mention his name.”

  Vladimir glanced at his laptop and camera on the dresser. At this stage of the game, a photograph of James’s little girl and the message “Accidents Happen” wasn’t going to do the trick. It wasn’t original anyway, just something he�
��d borrowed from Tony from Watertown after listening to Ryan’s radio show.

  “I’ll be sure to make him understand,” he said, tapping the flat edge of his straight razor against his thigh.

  47

  AROUND 11:00 P.M. RYAN PLANTED A GOOD-NIGHT KISS ON Ainsley’s forehead. She was sound asleep in her grandparents’ guest room, and he could smell the bubblegum-flavored toothpaste on her breath. Her toes were pressed up against the headboard, and her head was pointed toward the foot of the bed, which meant that she was deep in dreamland. It would be midnight by the time Ryan returned to Boston, and he didn’t see any point in waking her just to strap her in a booster seat for the long car ride home.

  “Tell Ainsley I’ll be back in time to take her to lunch,” he told Rachel.

  His mother-in-law was standing on the covered front porch of their brownstone, her arms folded tightly in the chilly night air.

  “Are you sure it’s okay for her to miss school tomorrow?”

  “Relax,” said Ryan. “This is a legitimate family crisis. At Brookline Academy, they give kids an excused absence to catch the ‘Last Call’ sale at Neiman Marcus.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” he said, smiling.

  Rachel swatted him playfully and offered a little smile in return. It was the first hint he’d seen of her sense of humor since Babes had disappeared.

  “Drive carefully,” she said, parting words that had special meaning in their family. Then she gave him a kiss on the cheek and went inside.

  Ryan’s car was parked on the street around the corner, about a block and a half away. He followed the stepping-stones across the Townsends’ tiny front lawn to the tree-lined side street. A rush of wind stirred the leaves overhead. A few fluttered downward and fell in Ryan’s path, but it was still a bit too early for Rhode Island’s red maple trees to surrender to autumn.

  Ryan dug into his pocket for his car keys, stopped, and glanced over his shoulder. He thought he’d heard footsteps behind him, but no one was in sight. Up ahead, the sidewalk darkened in the shadow of older, larger trees. Gnarly old roots had caused entire sections of the sidewalk to buckle over the years. Low-hanging limbs blocked the light of the streetlamps, forcing Ryan to locate his car more from memory than sight.

  Again, he heard footsteps. He walked faster, and the clicking of heels behind him seemed to match his pace. He stepped off the sidewalk and down off the curb, as if he were going to cross the street. The sound of the footsteps behind him changed along with his own, from heels on concrete to heels on asphalt. He returned to the sidewalk and heard the clicking heels behind him do the same.

  He was definitely being followed.

  Ryan stopped and turned. In the pitch darkness beneath the trees, he saw no one, but he sensed that someone was there.

  “Rachel, is that you?” He was pretty sure it wasn’t, but it sounded less paranoid than a nervous “Who’s there?”

  No one answered.

  Ryan reached for his cell phone. Just as he flipped it open, a crushing blow between the shoulder blades sent him flailing, face-first, to the sidewalk. The phone went flying, and the air rushed from his lungs. As he struggled to breathe and rise to one knee, an even harder blow sent him down again. This time he was too disoriented to break the fall. His chin smashed against the concrete. The salty taste of his own blood filled his mouth.

  “Why…are,” he said, trying to speak, but it was impossible to form an entire sentence.

  He was flat on his belly when the attacker grabbed him from behind, took a fistful of hair, and yanked his head back.

  “One move and I slice you from ear to ear.”

  Ryan froze. A steel blade was at his throat. The man’s voice sounded foreign, perhaps Russian. More important, the threat sounded real.

  “Take it easy,” said Ryan.

  “Shut up,” the man said. “And consider yourself warned.”

  “Warned—about what?”

  “No more calls on the radio from your brother-in-law.”

  “I can’t control that.”

  “Take control,” the man said, as he yanked Ryan’s head back harder. “If he calls, you hang up. Stick to sports, or stay off the air. Understand?”

  “You don’t—” Ryan stopped in midsentence. The blade was pressing harder against his throat.

  “Yes or no, big mouth? Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make sure you do,” he said, then he slammed Ryan’s forehead into the sidewalk.

  Ryan fought to stay conscious, but he was barely hanging on. He saw nothing, heard nothing, as his world slowly turned darker than the night itself.

  48

  EMMA WAS DRESSED FOR BED, RELAXING ON HER COUCH, AND watching the Late Show with David Letterman when her doorbell rang.

  Top ten reasons not to answer your door after 11:30 P.M.

  It rang again. She pulled on her robe and looked through the peephole, both relieved and surprised to see Ryan.

  “Can I come in?” he said as she opened the door.

  Her hesitation wasn’t intentional, but the nasty bruise on his forehead had taken her aback. “What happened to you?”

  “Occupational hazard. Someone doesn’t like my radio show.”

  Emma took him by the arm and led him to the couch. Ryan didn’t so much sit down as fall onto the overstuffed cushions. The way he looked gave her no time to worry about her own appearance—dressed in her favorite old robe, with no makeup on and her long brown hair up in a chip clip.

  “How did this happen?”

  He started to tell her, but she interrupted. “You’re going to have a knot the size of a walnut,” she said, gently touching his forehead. “Let me get some ice. But go on—what happened?”

  Ryan told her as she went into the kitchen and dug around in the freezer. She returned with a quart-size bag of ice in one hand and a bag of frozen peas in the other.

  “Personally, I like the peas,” she said, “but if you’re like most men with green vegetables, we can go with the ice.”

  Ryan almost laughed, but even the act of smiling seemed to hurt.

  “Lie back,” she said, as she helped him swing his legs up onto the couch. Ryan lowered his head onto the cushion, and Emma gently placed the cold bag of peas on his forehead.

  “How long were you unconscious?”

  “Maybe just a few minutes. Last thing I remember was some guy with a Russian accent telling me to stop talking to Babes on the radio.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “My cell went flying off somewhere in the attack, so I didn’t have a phone. My first thought anyway was to check on Ainsley and her grandparents, so I sort of hobbled back to the brownstone. Rachel and Ainsley were fine. Paul was still out looking for Babes, but we got him on his cell, and he was fine, too. This was directed only toward me, as a radio host, not at the family.”

  She lifted the bag of frozen peas to check his knot. “Oh, that looks wicked painful.”

  Wicked—another Roe-Dyelin thing. Winters were wicked cold, oysters were wicked fresh. Ryan hoped never to meet anyone who was wicked wicked.

  “Folks at the studio are going to think I got drunk and fell down,” he said.

  “Tell them Rhett Butler slugged you.”

  “What?”

  “That’s a Carlisle family joke. My grandmother was the only southerner in the family—from Atlanta. She got drunk one New Year’s Eve, started parading around the house like Scarlett O’Hara, and then fell down and broke her nose. From then on, we called her ‘Gone with the Gin.’”

  Ryan laughed, then groaned. It was his ribs this time. “Please, don’t make me laugh,” he said.

  “You think you should see a doctor?”

  “I thought I should see you first.”

  “Me? Sorry to disappoint you, but I have more in common with Clarence Darrow than Florence Nightingale.”

  “No, I was hoping that you might have some advice on how to handle this thug. Prosecuto
rs must get threats often enough. What should I do?”

  She nudged the bag of frozen peas back into place. “You should go on the radio and tell the world about the threat.”

  “He specifically told me to stick to sports from now on.”

  “You asked for my advice. As a prosecutor, I’ve butted heads with some scary characters. The best way to handle a threat against your own safety is to go public with it immediately.”

  “You really think that advice applies here?”

  “Absolutely. The more public you are about the threat, the harder it is for your attacker to carry it out.”

  “Okay,” said Ryan. “So at six A.M., I open Jocks in the Morning with the story of what happened to me tonight.”

  “Exactly. Spare no detail. If you want, I can be there in the studio with you.”

  “That’s probably a good idea. The first problem is figuring out how to get back to Boston. With this blow to the head, I’m not sure I should drive. I cabbed it over here from Pawtucket.”

  “Maybe you should go to the ER.”

  “If I’m feeling worse in the morning, I’ll see a doctor. Honestly, I don’t like going to emergency rooms.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said. Especially the one in Pawtucket. God, you’re an idiot sometimes, Emma.

  Ryan sat up, seeming to sense that she was silently chiding herself. “I guess I should get going,” he said.

  He handed her the bag of peas, and as the thawing vegetables changed hands, Emma saw past the bruising on Ryan’s face and found something else entirely. The same expression she’d noticed for the first time at the Marble House fund-raiser. The same one she’d seen again yesterday when Ryan had glanced at her through the studio glass. It was a look that had nothing to do with a need for sympathy or justice. Emma didn’t know where this was headed, but it suddenly occurred to her that she’d been too nice for too long to guys like Doug Wells.

  “I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I sent you out on the road in this condition,” she said.